It is common practice to regulate access to territorial borders to authorized individuals. It is also common to control access to portions of business property such as research and development areas, controlled areas such as flight line access, airports, seaports, and vendor-only areas in trade shows. Access to many other locations may also need to be controlled for various reasons. Typically, some form of identification card is used to identify individuals before they are allowed access.
Various forms of identification cards have been used to help identify an individual including paper passports, visas, birth certificates, social security cards, drivers licenses and employee identification cards. Unfortunately each of the latter have been known to be forged thus reducing the acceptance of such identification cards as proof of positive identification. More recently, biometric authentication systems have been introduced where an iris scanner, a fingerprint sensor on kiosk or contact-based smart card is used to help identify an individual or user. The latter generally require the user to stop or exit a vehicle to prove their identity. Facial recognition systems have also been entertained to identify watch-listed persons, but the results have not been satisfactory.
Personal devices are known that allow a user store data in the device for the purpose of providing data to an external system. For example, an identification card having a magnetic strip allow personal information to be stored such as birth dates or social security numbers and the magnetic strip is used to provide the personal information to a magnetic stripe reader. Unfortunately, if the personal device is stolen, an unauthorized user would be able to use the card. To increase the security of such a system, often a personal identification number (PIN) is required, but an unauthorized user would be able to try various PIN numbers until one was found that worked.